


spoken, snarled, sworn

by misandrywitch



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Childhood Memories, Dysfunctional Family, concurrent to that conversation in 'Kitty Cat Caper pt. 2'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-12
Updated: 2017-04-12
Packaged: 2018-10-17 19:19:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10600518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misandrywitch/pseuds/misandrywitch
Summary: If only it were that easy, in the long run, to forget the place you came from.





	

**Author's Note:**

> junosteeled.tumblr.com
> 
> once upon a time in my real cheque please heyday i was really great about writing 1-3k reaction fics after each update, which were attempts to write quickly & fluently without a lot of editing. i'm trying to do something similar for penumbra but keep getting a little carried away. so it goes. 
> 
> this is a somewhat introspective look at juno's history & family & his dear old ma, meaning it contains some of the heavily-implied nuances of their relationship which aren't pretty or nice. so tread carefully. title from 'no concern of yours' by the punch brothers ("we're not here to talk about me, we're here to get things done.")
> 
> 'Just me, Ben, and… good old Ma.  
> Then she got bad. Then Oldtown happened. Or maybe it was the other way around. It was too long ago to remember."
> 
>  
> 
> (PRE MONSTER'S REFLECTION AKA MY OWN INTERPRETATION OF BEN STEEL. I LIKE THE REAL ONE BETTER BUT HONESTLY THE BIT ABOUT BEN FEELING EXASPERATED AT JUNO GETTING PUNCHED IN THE FACE DOESN'T FEEL FAR OFF)

 

 

Late night dissolves into early morning and Juno walks, collar up, into Halcyon Park.

If it was later in the day there would be people around to give him a dirty look, a sidelong glance implying he doesn’t fit in here. Doesn’t belong. He could argue that yes, in a way he does because he lived here once, same as them, but what’s the use?

Once Oldtown gets its claws in you they’re damn difficult to pull back out.

Like drawing poison out of a wound, or some other equally unpleasant metaphor about sepsis and fatal diagnoses. Juno’s got plenty.

But the square is empty, house windows dark and quiet. There’s something sobering about the early light here and Juno lets muscle memory more than conscious thought pull him through the grass that’s slick with artificial dew, letting his shoes get wet rather than walking on the path.

He doesn’t remember which house the lived in. It doesn’t really matter, as they look pretty much the same -- wide glass windows, front stoops, expensive bannisters. Elegant throwback designs. Hyperion City is sleek and neon, metal jungle towers and constant traffic and red sand over every inch of you. Here -- you almost feel like you’re somewhere else.

That’s the point, of course. The cost of living in a place like this is so you can forget the rest of the city’s out there at all.

The bench is empty. Juno’s early, or whoever he’s meeting isn’t coming. He sits down, closes his eyes. Listens to birdsong.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He’s nine, maybe, when he realizes something is wrong with her. Really realizes it. Really wrong.

Life is a colliding card tower of interlocking events, tenuous and connected and balanced just so. His mother had this story, to explain it. Juno had asked, because he can remember a time when things were different -- a different house, different neighborhood. Birds singing outside the window, the kind the homeowner’s insurance shells out to have repopulated whenever the radiation creeps too high and kills them off. Flowers, foundations. Not this -- the rental with no yard and Mister Mercury selling speed on his front porch two numbers down. Not going to bed hungry half the time and never knowing for sure if their school will be open on Fridays because of citywide emergency wartime budget cuts.

Not this. Their mother, wavering between waxen and frantic. Anger and apathy. Sometimes Juno thinks she doesn’t even know that they’re there. Sometimes he wishes she’d forget faster.

He doesn’t remember her like that before, but he’d been young, and Oldtown does that to you. Picks at the thing already weighing you down and tugs and tugs and tugs. He knows that she got by, for a long time, hauling that heaviness around. Until one day she didn't. 

So she had this story. Some of it was probably true, and it was just nebulous enough that it felt plausible until the second or third time when the details changed. The blame shifted. Her work. False accusations. The war, the war, the war. It was hard on everybody but they didn’t ask for this, not on Mars. That was the early days when it all felt very far away but she'd gotten desperate, she made a mistake, she wasn't to blame, she didn’t have any choice, two kids and nobody else for them to rely on. She never wanted this for them.

She was good at telling stories. It had been her job, at one point. 

He repeats it to Mick Mercury, once, and Mick frowns.

“Really?” he asks.

“What’s that mean?” Juno gets defensive. It’s the best way to have the upper hand, here. Be ready for a fight first. He’s nine and he’s learned that already.

“I don’t know,” Mick shrugs and picks at a scab on his knee. They’d spent the afternoon hauling each other up and down the street in a battered shopping cart and had the scars to prove it. “Just, you know. Sounds like the kinda thing my uncle says to my dad when Dad wants to know where his rent money’s coming from.”

“Everybody knows your uncle sells drugs, Mercury.”

“Well, yeah. But he doesn’t want my dad to know that.”

“You’re calling my mother a liar?”

“No, Jay,” Mick says quickly, and Juno unclenches his fist.

Years later, Juno thinks back on some of Mick’s stories -- not the wild ones which usually played the best but the rare and hopeful ones -- and that tale of his mother’s and wonders how he didn’t see through it sooner.

 

 

 

 

 

There shouldn’t be anything wrong with wanting to believe the best in people. In another neighborhood, it might even be seen as a virtue but here it’s just a weakness. And Juno’s learning.

 

 

 

 

 

“I saw your friend’s parents today,” his mother says, her voice wavering a little from the battered armchair that’s the centerpiece of their crammed living room. Juno didn’t realize it was occupied because she’d been gone, absent, for the better part of three days. It’s one or the other and depends on the presence in the armchair. Space to be skirted, left undisturbed.

Juno is thirteen and he feels that way himself more and more. As if the shape of him, inside, mirrors her outside on her worst days. Twisted and unrecognizable, sticky. Cold.

“Which,” Juno says, even though he knows.

“That poor little girl,” his mother says, and she sounds sad. “Things like that never happened where I grew up.”

He’s seen Sasha’s parents only from a distance, in the last three months. He sees Sasha almost every day but sometimes it feels like he isn’t seeing her at all, like she isn’t really there.

He doesn’t want to talk about this. Not with his mother. They hardly talk about it with each other.

“Juno,” his mother says, before Juno can escape the room. “Come here, would you?”

He crosses around the chair because she isn’t angry, right now, and it’s a delicate place to keep here in that space.

“Yeah?”

His mother’s dark hair tumbles over one shoulder and her eyes are clear, clear enough. It’s less and less frequent.

“I just wanted to look at you. It’s just sad.” She reaches up and touches his face for a second, moves hair behind his ear. Her eyes are huge and they are sad. For Annie Wire, sure. For the series of events that led them to live in a neighborhood where kids like Juno get nice little girls like Annie Wire into trouble. That Juno is a kid like Juno, at all.

“You keep an eye on your brother, right? Always?”

“Yeah,” Juno says, and he means it. Means it with all he’s got. “Always.”

 

 

Something in her voice almost feels like some kind of apology, an admission of failure and a desire for forgiveness. He feels sorry for her then. He does, sometimes.

Less and less, though. As he gets older.

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Do you really think I look cool? Olivia Cheng said she thought it looks cool.”

“Looks like you got a stick sticking out of your mouth.”

“So, is that a yes?”

“Gonna take more than a cigarette to change you,” Juno makes a grab for Mick’s cigarette and Mick, feet taller, holds it way up in the air so Juno has to jump. They scuffle, killing time, waiting for Ben to leave the school building so they can all wander in the direction of home together with the hopes that something would arise to delay that end destination. Ben was better at that stuff, book stuff, always staying late and attracting the attention of even the most exhausted and downtrodden teachers stuck in public schools in Old Town. But when Juno’s brother appears there’s a bruise, a red mar, on his chin and scrapes on his knees.

“Who was it this time?” Juno asks, and Ben tells him, and the kid’s name gets long forgotten but the fight doesn’t. Mick and Ben both haul him up and off. Blood ground into his knuckles and his nailbeds, a tremendous black eye, the kind that lingers yellow and puffy for weeks and a dull ache in his right wrist that will stick around much longer. But it’s worth it for that moment of triumph, a bully’s broken nose and how the bones in his cheek seemed to shift, liquid, under already swelling bruises.

A lesson you can’t escape. Stuck a lot more than writing lines on the board.

“What the fuck,” their mother says when they finally troop inside, skinned knees and Juno blinking at her with only one good eye, blood on his knuckles. “Again? Your face looks like roadkill, Juno. Who was it this time, huh?”

“My fault,” Juno says, automatically, before his brother can speak.

“Usually is.”

“Aren’t you gonna ask if I won?” Juno feels brave, adrenaline-filled and stupid.

“Get the fuck out of my sight,” his mother says, and the shattering glass of a thrown liquor bottle follows them out the door as they go for cover.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Ben says. He holds his elbows with both hands, turned small and in on himself even though he's two inches taller than Juno is and always has been.

“Sure I did,” Juno says. “Someone like that doesn’t learn his lesson any other way, Bee. Sometimes when he shoves you gotta shove back.”

“Maybe," Ben says. “And maybe you go looking for fights.”

“Maybe you outta. Maybe they’d push you around less. If you don’t wanna ask me how to throw a punch, ask Sasha. She’ll show you.”

“So, what? Then they’ll just say I’m asking for it. Then it never stops,” Ben says and his eyes are serious. He’s always saying shit like that, way beyond his years.

“It’s not gonna stop anyway.”

“And my face doesn’t look like mincemeat. One of us has to stay better looking or nobody's gonna be able to tell us apart.”

A joke. Juno laughs in the same breath that he says “Fuck you.”

And then his brother catches him by the arm, reaches out and puts his hand against the black-blue bruise under Juno’s eye. Just for a second, his fingers cool on Juno’s face and his eyes wide and serious. Light eyes, a shade lighter than Juno’s own. The three of them all have eyes like that, bright in dark faces, and there’s no question when you see them together who is related to who.

But there’s gentleness in Ben’s fingers, something far outside the scope of his years, when he touches the bruise on Juno’s face. He’s always been like that, his whole life. Not quite suited for where he is, a little too knowing and often with something to say that you don’t want to hear. Thinks about things too much, Ben does. Doesn’t know when to keep his trap shut -- and not in the way Juno doesn’t, the kind of thing always designed to make you laugh or get mad or throw a punch. Just weird stuff. It sets him apart.

Juno -- the opposite. He blends right in here, his words sharp and filled with slang and wisecracks. He doesn’t mind being obnoxious enough that attention slides in his direction, rather than Ben’s, because he can hold his own. He’s good at that.

Always the last person standing, Juno is, even when his face looks like roadkill afterwards. It always sounds better in Mick’s retellings, when it doesn’t sting anymore.

Ben shouldn’t have had to grow up here. It’s not fair, and there’s absolutely nothing Juno can do about it. Not like he would have fit in anywhere else.

“Come on,” Juno says, brusquely. He reaches up and ruffles his brothers hair, dark curls grown a little too long. “Let’s go see if I can nick some ice from Mick’s uncle before he gets back.”

“Idiot,” Ben says, and elbows him, and Juno elbows back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of the two of them he was always more like their mother.

The irony of which one of them is still breathing isn’t lost on Juno. You'd think that -- if there was any kind of justice in this world -- two people who came into the world back to back and side by side, one and then the other, wouldn't have to leave it alone. But there isn't. That isn't how life works. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juno doesn’t spend money for a year except to buy booze, and almost never sleeps in his own house, and when he turns eighteen he packs up everything he owns and he tries to get lost before she notices what’s going on. It doesn’t work.

“I should’ve expected this,” she says, tearstained. Angry -- but she’s always angry. Her eyes are very blue. “You don’t care about anyone but yourself, Juno Steel.”

“That’s not true and you know it,” Juno says, fist white around the handle of his bag. “I can’t stay here anymore.” I’m going to do something that matters, he thinks, but he doesn’t say that.

“Fine then,” his mother says. “You just don’t care about me and it doesn’t even bother you.”

“You had one son who was nice,” Juno says, because he knows it will hurt. “Too bad for you he’s dead.”

“Get out!” His mother throws a glass, then a bottle, and Juno does. He leaves Oldtown, and he doesn’t look back.

 

 

 

 

 

 

If only it were that easy, in the long run, to forget the place you came from.

Years later, Juno will meet a man who sheds the inconvenient details of his existence like he’s changing his coat; who escapes, free and swift, leaving behind only a folded piece of paper, a lingering drift of cologne, the memory of a kiss. Juno will watch the newsfeed, abandoned cop car, and feel something sick and cold that’s dangerously close to envy.

(That’s before he learns the details, and he feels guilty for it when he does. It isn’t easy to become someone who has nothing at all tying them down -- and it doesn’t mean Peter has nothing to leave behind. Just that he had no other choice.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juno wins the Hyperion City Police Department’s annual sharpshooting contest for the second year in a row. There isn’t competition, really, though a few people come close. They go out for drinks after, his unit, and he downs two beers faster than the rest of them and then sits on the edges of several conversations until Mick thankfully materializes to rescue him.

Not a notable memory, because he also wins the year after. There were lots of nights like that, in the HCPD.

Except that, four days later, Juno kills somebody.

It’s a raid. Oldtown. Drug deal. Should be by-the-book but it isn’t, it goes wrong. Someone’s armed that shouldn’t be and Juno’s partner, older and practically impervious to his one-liners, yells and clutches her arm in pain before they can get enough bearing to figure out what’s going on.

When you get fired on you fire back. That’s the rules, in Hyperion City.

“Kid!” His partner yells. “Act like you’re as good as everyone says you are and do something!” Her face is white, back pressed against one side of the doorframe. There’s a smell, acrid. Laser fire, burning flesh. The two officers behind them start firing through the door, haphazard.

Juno, on the other side of the doorframe, swallows down the bile in his throat.

“You want me to -- “

“You a cop or a coward, Steel?”

Funny question. Answer’s probably both, and that makes him angry. Maybe that was the point. Some days Juno doesn’t know why he keeps doing this job, but now’s not the time to wonder that. Whoever is in that room is a lot better shot than these assholes. That much is obvious.

Juno slides his finger around the trigger, his own blood pounding in his ears. When he turns his head he can see the man, big guy, huge gun on his shoulder. A difficult shot, as he’s half-hidden in another doorway and the light in the room is dim except for the red laser fire light and the strange moving shadows it casts.

Juno breathes in, out. He can feel his anger -- at his partner, for being so stupid, for saying what she said. At himself -- for being here at all. At everyone else -- for not being smart enough to avoid this mess. It’s red and caustic, smoke and glass in his throat and he breathes around it. It propels him forward. He hardly has to try.

He fires. Right between the eyes. And the man drops to the floor.

As easy as that. Like throwing a bottle in a moment of rage.

 

 

He gets a commendation for it. He saved the lives of the other four officers, probably, and stopped someone responsible for the accidental overdoses of four teenage kids at an Uptown high school. Juno had bit back a comment about the number of kids buying dope from this guy in Oldtown for years and years, and how nobody cared about that at all.

There’s no space for opinion in the police force. Do your job, get your commendation, take home your cut and maybe a little extra if you know the right people.

His captain shakes Juno’s hand in front of the whole precinct.

“Sharp shooting, Steel,” he says. “Good eyes.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You’ll make a difference. I see you doing well. Keep it up.”

A difference to who? The man, who’s dead? The kids he hurt who nobody noticed? The next drug ring that will move in to take his place? They could have made a real difference if they hadn’t waited until someone paying off some deputy somewhere up the chain got worried. Could make a real difference, if they listened to the people who actually needed their help. Juno could have done what he did a long time before he did it. If.

He doesn’t say any of that. Doesn’t let it cross his face. It is nice, after all, to be good at something.

“Thank you, sir.”

 

 

They celebrate, and a lot of people who haven’t really given him the time of day before congratulate him, and all Juno can think about is how it felt. Taking the shot. The anger, when it should have been logic or precision. It’s gone now but he remembers exactly how it felt. Knows what it looks like, on his face and someone else’s.

Anybody knows he’s seen it enough.

Something close to righteousness.That’s the feeling. It hadn’t been bad.

Juno goes home, and he drinks and drinks and drinks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

He was hurting people. Juno stopped him. And that’s a good thing, what he’s supposed to do. How it sits in his own soul doesn’t matter much at all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There’s an old saying, some proverb from Earth or whatever. Blood is thicker than water. Thicker than whiskey. Thicker than red Martian sand.

The things that run in the family go far beyond what’s on the surface.

 Not long after that, his mother kills herself. He's in uniform when he gets the call, in uniform when he goes to verify that yeah, that is Sarah Steel and yeah, it looks like it was purposeful and no, I don't think I'll hold a funeral cause I don't know who would bother to come. 

He'd see her, on occasion, when he was assigned to patrol Old Town. Sometimes on accident. Once or twice on purpose. Sometimes she was happy to see him too. Most of the time she wasn't. 

Once, when she was doing - not well, because there was no spectrum of "good" and "bad" for her, but better - she'd touched the starched edge of his uniform shirt collar. 

"That looks good on you," she'd said. Juno couldn't tell if that was a compliment or an insult. 

So she dies. And Juno wants to think that's the end of it, the things she is and the things she left behind.

It's not. Really, it's just the beginning. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He gets kicked off the force and it seems inevitable because he’d felt himself swinging wild, angry and chafing at the self-imposed rules that benefit nobody but the cops who follow them because they aren’t meant to.

Seen that happen before, of a sort. It was always somebody else’s fault, she’d said. Over and over.

He runs up an enormous debt, and he’s seen that happen before. Juno grits his teeth and works his way out of it, works and works to prove himself wrong.

He falls in love with a married man, and he’s seen that happen before too. For a while it’s so good that he doesn’t have to think about the consequences and then he accepts them, heavy and hard, because penance is better than denial and he knew what the outcome could be when he started.

“Get out of here,” he says, when they speak for the last time. “Don’t ever want to see you again.”

His mother had said something like that to him, the day he’d left home for good. Blood and water and whiskey and sand.

It's something close to decency -- a courtesy really -- when he leaves Peter Nureyev behind, because Juno knows what will happen. Eventually. He's seen it happen before. Heartbreak is inevitable -- and he doesn't kid himself into thinking Peter will miss him for very long. Really, Juno's just beating himself to the punch. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One root of that good old family tree -- to hit first and hit hard and carry your regrets with you when you go. Throw them in the drink and see what works as a lifeline.

He’s never been any good at anything other than being the last one on his feet in a fight, and some days he’s not even good at that. He has no misconceptions about how this is going to end.

Peter says his name, sleepy and soft, as Juno shifts and stands. His face, cast in shadow and soft red light, is less angles and lines. How reduced to geometry, fragments of a whole so up close -- mouth against Juno’s neck, hands on Juno’s hands. He looks younger, the slyness of his gaze hidden, the cleverness of his mouth relaxed into a bow, partially open. Juno wants to stay forever, wants to run and never look back, wants to throw up.

He kisses Peter’s forehead, once. And then he leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Juno’s not stupid enough to know he always does the right thing. No way in hell. But he tries. And that should count for something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birdsong, and the voice of the man sitting next to him. Ramses O'Flaherty looks older than he does on television. He feels familiar, and Juno doesn't know why. That should make him nervous.

In a spiraling alternate series of events, Juno grew up here. He doesn't know who that person would be -- if he'd be recognizable when passed in the street. If they'd know each other at all. 

There's a new memory there, one the birds touch on. It surprises him, eyes closed, as Juno deliberates. Birdsong -- early morning. Music, floating up through a bureaucratic office window in a flower-lined city that Juno has never visited himself, far far across the galaxy. An old familiar tune, familiar when it shouldn't be, that touches something in him -- a long-buried memory that doesn't belong to him at all. A shadowy face. A half-remembered father. 

They aren't Juno's memories. But they're buried in his head like he stole them. Maybe he did. 

Juno's palms itch. 

This should make him nervous.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Useless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In a spiraling alternate series of events, he wakes up to birdsong with someone beside him in bed. Clever smile, sly eyes. Peter would fit in here, in appearance anyway, with his tailored suits and elegant wrists. Until he robbed everyone on the block blind. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All he wanted to do was the right thing. Impossible, when you can't shoot in a straight line. Only thing he was ever good at, other than being the last person standing in a fight. The hero private eye. Sure -- in a perfect world. That isn't the one Juno gets to live in, and shooting in a straight line always feels a little like throwing a bottle at a wall. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Fine, Ramses," Juno says. "I'll do it." 

 

 


End file.
